I was ... in Japan ... Germany, France ... research of psycholinguistics and I have learn Japanese, German, English, Russian and French
I guess the equivalent for me would be to know Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese ... and maybe Sanskrit too - help! ... In fact I'm very impressed :-) I'm functional in the native languages of most of the European countries, but they do at least work on the same basis at English ... I did think of learning Russian or Arabic
(after teaching Swedish to a mixed class of Somalis, Kurds and Eritreans)
as my next 'world language', but making web-sites took over instead :-)
I had a very interesting experience recently with my 5-year-old nephew Edwin: he has a favourite multimedia story we play with together on my Mac, and there's a choice of languages to begin with. It's a matter of pure routine that I tell him all the choices rather than just clicking on one for him, and this day he decided to go for the Japanese version. Of course he had the pictures to go by, and he knew the story and all the games, but he listened very seriously to the whole thing in Japanese, and imitated the bits which resonated for him in some special way - great fun :-) And most important, he increased his awareness that listening to other languages is something unremarkable...
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